


Once More (Day 21 - Childhood Friends)

by AsYouCommand (OminousHummingObelisk)



Series: AUgust All Year Long [7]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Depression, Gen, Government-Perpetuated Atrocities, Mention of Invasive Medical Procedures, Second Chances, Terrorism, Wish Fulfillment, cowardice, mention of past drug use, social inequality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:21:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24513010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OminousHummingObelisk/pseuds/AsYouCommand
Summary: I asked him to sign his work, so I'd always keep what he did in mind.In which Pharma grieves for a lost chance all his life, and then—
Series: AUgust All Year Long [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763485
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Once More (Day 21 - Childhood Friends)

He followed the path expected of him after the events at the function camp. He finished his training, got his medical license, and was heralded as the greatest medical professional of the current age. He continually awed the entire world by performing surgeries that no one had imagined were possible. He never thought of what should be _possible_ when he did such things; all he did was take the most efficient path to the desired result. Some of his innovations were later adapted so they could be taught to all other doctors, but some remained the sole property of his genius and the world accepted that no one but him could have performed them. He never understood why. On a certain level, he resigned himself to never grasping the way that every other person thought. It was often tiring.

That event had happened so very long ago, centuries now, but he still regretted that all-important act of cowardice. He identified with that hateful label, allowing it to sink into himself and secretly stain the person that the rest of the world imagined him to be. He let himself choose cowardice, feeling the same sting again and again, as he watched the new society grow. 

They were in the news, Megatron and Orion, as they reached out to more and more of the dispossessed, the low castes who had never been given any choices in their lives. The people that they spoke to grasped the one choice that they were offered and joined the growing movement, spreading the new society in secret. Those caught and questioned said only that they were all Decepticons and there were no castes among them any longer. Soon there would be no castes anywhere, they swore, because where people would not give up such separation on their own, Megatron and Orion would tear the barriers down. 

The two leaders would not speak to the news or the government, not in ways that the government was willing to share with the public. Low-res recordings were sometimes shown on the vidscreens - Orion or Megatron speaking to crowds who were packed into sewer spaces, warehouses, temporary structures put up and torn down on the edges of cities in the space of a day. In the recordings, the crowds cheered, raising their fists and sometimes weeping openly, but the news outlets never played any of the sound. Perhaps they feared what would happen if the public heard what was being said. 

_Report all sightings of this mark_ , the enforcers commanded sternly in their press conferences, showing the jagged purple badge that the insurgents wore and splashed alongside their seditious graffiti. Pharma had seen their writings hastily painted on the sides of buildings in his own upper-class housing division - _Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings_ with that mark like punctuation at the end - and had not reported anything. If he was not brave enough to help them, then he could at least not help their enemies. Somebody else would see it and report it anyway, he knew, so it wasn't as if his pitiful rebellion had any real effect. 

He was a coward. Inaction was a fundamental part of his life, made so in that handful of moments in his sparklinghood. 

Shockwave had long vanished, at least the version of him that was any help to the movement. Pharma was stunned by the complete lack of response from ordinary people when Shockwave reappeared, having been openly shadowplayed and subjected to empurata - two punishments that were supposed to remain below the awareness of proper society. But when both were so openly revealed, the public didn't rise up. Nobody even talked about it much except in pointless conversation about how awful things were. 

They trusted the government. They believed that the government always wanted their good and correctly identified the evils that people needed protection against. When the government committed atrocities against citizens, then the victims must have deserved it, even though people never understood exactly why. 

The insurgents were beginning to sabotage the infrastructure that kept the upper-class districts so lush and pleasant. Pharma himself had endured the loss of many utilities and luxuries over time as the Decepticons blew up or shut down their sources. He never complained or even bothered to mention them, although they were often the only thing that other people wanted to talk about. The movement never targeted anything that would interfere with truly vital services. 

Some of the utilities stayed down for a long, long time because something had been done to the machinery that required it to be almost completely rebuilt before it would work again. 

Pharma was a coward, so when he was not doing the work that he loved (and which took all his thoughts away from his regret and worry), he sat alone in his expensive rooftop hab with the lights off, eating rust sticks and watching the movement grow through sensationalized news reports. 

He found that he really had a taste for rust sticks, though most of the people in his social circle either had never heard of them or knew them as lower-caste sludge that the poor consumed to take their minds off of starvation. They could never be found anywhere in the neighborhoods where Pharma's kind was supposed to stay. They were sold only in the run-down laborer ghettos, far from the city center and down at actual base street level, where sweeper maintenance-builds continually fought a losing battle against the drifts of garbage and oil drippings that fell from the upper districts. Pharma used a very expensive attention deflector cloak when he descended to restock on his indulgence, less to protect himself from the stigma of going to such a place and more to protect the people that he was visiting. The last thing that they likely wanted was a storm of attention after the world's top surgeon was seen buying junk food in the slums. 

It had been hard work just finding lower-caste people in his area to ask about the best places to buy rust sticks. The upper castes wanted the necessary maintenance- and labor-builds to stay well-hidden so their betters would not be reminded of their existence. Cross-referenced, there were three places that had made the best confections for a thousand years or more; one he was always warned against for reasons that his informants would not specify. He went to that one first, of course, and badly frightened the empuratee confectioner, who had such an ingrained terror of doctors after what had been done to him that he fled into the back room and his apprentice had to complete the sale. As he left, Pharma saw, painted very small in a corner of the front window and conveniently covered by a layer of grime, a familiar purple symbol. 

Those rust sticks were the best that he ever had, but out of respect for their maker, Pharma never returned to that shop. 

Anyone he described his favorite candy to reacted with disgust at the thought of what those ingredients would do to a person's fuel circulation system. Surely the byproducts would build up so quickly inside the pump that he would notice an almost immediate decrease in functionality? Pharma had once talked through the obvious fix, which was to adjust one's base self-maintenance software to a fuel cycling rhythm of five-hour intervals - which was nowhere near the maximum, near-stasis level of thirty-six hours, and was a procedure that any ordinary person could be taught to do - open up one's chest, remove one's own fuel pump after clamping off the primary circulatory tubing, and just clean the pump out by hand. It wasn't difficult to open, and you could basically rinse it out in the sink, apply an over-the-counter sanitizing wash, and reinstall it before your frame even noticed it was gone. Not hard at all. 

The people he'd been talking to were speechless, looking at him in a blend of horror and awe. He realized that he'd said something abnormal again and excused himself to go pretend to prep for another surgery. 

That was his cowardly contribution to the cause of the new society. Doing nothing helpful or harmful and sometimes giving subspace change from his enormous salary to the working poor in exchange for pump-rotting candy that nobody else in his caste would ever stoop to eating. He just watched from his ivory tower as the conflict happened around him, sometimes inconvenienced by temporary decreases in his level of luxury but overall untouched. None of it had to be his problem. He was a coward and he was safe. 

The government propaganda ramped up, describing the Decepticons as a terrorist army who indiscriminately destroyed people of all castes with their bombing and sabotage. Factories, waste reclamation facilities, and mines with workers still inside blew up across the world with increasing frequency - nothing like the surgical operations that were the hallmark of the Decepticons, which had targeted upper-caste infrastructure and never harmed a single worker. The news showed constant images of the devastation after the bombings - buildings collapsed down onto ruined machinery, smelting pits ruptured and oozing thick flame, the twisted bodies of haulers and laborers already grey, blending into the shattered stone, their dripping pink life pooling together. The Decepticons' relatively tidy attacks continued in the midst of all of this, sharply contrasting with the horror, and Pharma strongly suspected that the government was bombing its own resources and blaming the Decepticons to control popular sentiment. He was disturbed by how well it seemed to be working. The people he talked to believed the news completely and he felt like he had underestimated how much he didn't understand ordinary people. 

As part of the propaganda (he was sure), the government sponsored more outreach programs to the slums and factory towns, generously sending all sorts of relief to communities impacted by the terrorist attacks and to the poor in general. One such program involved sending teams of high-status doctors down to offer free medical care. 

Pharma jumped at the chance, surprising the people who knew him and his uncaring attitude toward anything involving the unrest. But his cowardice would permit this. The government put these programs together and was quietly threatening to start drafting doctors if insufficient numbers volunteered, so Pharma was just drifting along with the tide, the way he always did. Probably they would have ordered him to go if he hadn't decided on his own, he reasoned. 

Free medical care by top doctors in the slums. Just like Ratchet did, which was certainly why the government was doing it now. Pharma had tracked him all across the planet as Ratchet moved from city to city, taking over abandoned buildings in the poorest sectors and setting up free clinics, presumably funded by the Decepticons. There was little point in him trying to stay hidden, as the poor tended to rebuild their shanties around his clinics so quickly that the authorities couldn't help but notice. Ratchet and his assistants worked continually until the cities came down to arrest him for any number of crimes - encouraging vagrancy, unlawful occupation of a structure, practicing medicine without a license, those sorts of things - and Ratchet would work up to the last possible moment before his clinic would vanish, equipment and all, untraceably. There would be a couple of months of laying low and then it would happen again on the other side of the planet. Pharma had taken an internal image capture the first time the news showed a grainy picture of Ratchet, his face stern and gaze fierce as he surveyed the impoverished crowd. He wore the colors and crosses of a full doctor even though he had certainly not been officially trained and licensed, and the purple brand was displayed openly over his spark. 

Pharma was so jealous that he burned. His self-imposed lack of concern melted under something like hate and grief and who knew what else, a vicious, devouring darkness. He hated Ratchet for being what Pharma could not bring himself to be, and he hated himself for the inaction that had closed that future off to him. He stopped watching the news for an entire week after seeing that image - the one that he now kept stored in his dedicated memory drives, where it could be retrieved in a nanosecond, like his medical information files - and he would only work and then sit in the dark afterward, boiling inside his spark, making himself suffer. 

He considered taking up an engex addiction, which seemed to be a common thing that people did to quiet their inner pain, but he decided that he couldn't accept the impact on his functioning. He would keep himself cruelly sober. And eventually, like a beaten lover, he crawled back to the vidscreen and his obsession with watching the war that was brewing under the skin of ordinary society. 

The opportunity to work in the slums was a blessing and soothed him like nothing else had for a long time. He had tricked his cowardice into permitting this little scrap of help offered to the people who formed the core of the movement. The work was emotionally draining, however, because there could be no followup appointments or prescription refills for these patients. He hoped that he at least communicated to them that he wished that he could do more. Many were grateful with a strong undercurrent of bitterness and cynicism that he completely understood. 

And once he looked up to see his next slum-dwelling patient and saw something entirely unexpected - a gleaming auto-frame, built for speed and modified for power to drive his armored weight, black and white and gold and holding himself like a predator with a cold smile. 

"Something tells me that you're not in need of the care we're providing here," Pharma said, returning cold for cold. 

The speedster grinned and chuckled, revealing actual predator-pattern dental restructuring, which Pharma hadn't known was a real thing that real people actually modded into themselves. He began to suspect that he was looking at a mob enforcer, who was here to...what, kidnap him? In broad daylight with hundreds of other people around, including enforcers? How did he even get in here, looking so obviously lethal? 

"I waited in line like everybody else," the killer said, his voice carrying the smoky, far-back roll that was a native Rodion accent. "They said you were the best for big-deal brain repair." 

Pharma snorted. The things people said about him. He should have stopped being irritated by it long ago. "Hardly. But possibly one of the better ones on site, so I suppose it's not completely untrue. What sort of brain damage do you think that you have?" Because he still doubted that there could be anything seriously wrong with this aggressively healthy specimen. His masters surely kept him in the best repair to get the most murder mileage out of him. 

The grin remained. "Circuit boosters. A lot, for a long time." 

Pharma furrowed his brow. "How long is a long time?" 

"Two hundred fifty years, give or take eighty. Don't remember much from then." 

"...You are unnaturally articulate for someone who might have over three centuries of booster abuse. You can focus on a topic long enough to form a whole sentence about it, for one thing. You're standing upright, for another. Your joint articulators don't appear to be burning through your armor, for a third. Also—“ 

"Why don't you just take a look, Doc? Maybe I'm about to drop dead right here in your office." 

Pharma packed all of his doubt into one cutting look, but said, "For circuit booster damage, you need to be completely aware for the entire procedure with no pain blocks." 

"I know." 

A strange answer. But Pharma turned to his equipment and the probably-murderer let the examination slab scan his frame and reconfigure itself to his anatomy before climbing on. Pharma hooked him up to several monitoring devices to track his brain activity during the complex, traumatic surgery that such a repair would require. "I'm going to strap you down. You can't move a micron while I'm working or else the damage can become even more severe." 

"I don't need it."  
"...You're going to cut power to your entire muscle cable system, or...?"  
"Something like that. Don't worry about it." 

Pharma sighed. At least the people living down here had no way to sue him for malpractice, especially if they died on the table from any one of the dozens of infirmities that they tended to have. If this killer wanted to tough out his own brain surgery and crippled himself with a tiny flinch, it was on him. Pharma sent the medical overrides to release the clamps on the patient's layers of cranial plating, popping a lamp out of the side of his helm so he could examine the inside of the skull. 

The brain module was pristine, the kind of flawless structure that was usually found only in the highest castes, whose constant maintenance and best-quality fuel prevented any corrosion from forming. But he could see that it had been extensively repaired, over fifty percent painstakingly stripped and reconstructed. A depth scan revealed that some of the damage had even reached into the deep personality cores, but whoever had done the repairs had customized the fix to the patient instead of simply rebuilding the cores into a generic configuration. The surgeon had worked to preserve the personality, not just to restore functionality. It was a work of art, the sort of thing that Pharma was continually praised for in the dozens of medical journals that made it their business to analyze his techniques. 

He angled the light around the curve of the brain, down to where the spinal cabling grew into the neck, and caught sight of an unfamiliar shape on the inside of the skull casing. There was a delicate laser-scalpel etching on the metal, winding around the supportive cranial spines. A signature. 

_Ratchet, Chief Medical Officer of the Decepticon Army._

Pharma froze, shock turning him cold. 

"I asked him to sign his work," the speedster said softly, whispering a secret. "So I'd always keep what he did in mind, get it?" He grinned again, then quickly sobered. "He saved my life. I wasn't even alive then, just a sick body going after fixes. Didn't remember anything. Orion Pax himself found me shooting right into my brain and brought me in to Ratchet. Ratchet didn't know me from anybody, didn't care I was trash—" Pharma flinched, hearing an echo of Damus from long ago. "—He spent hours in there, and I kept remembering more and more until I was a real person again, like before I started boosting. Didn't know it was even possible. He kept yelling at me for crying while he was working, said I was distracting him. Couldn't help it. I was just so happy." The speedster laughed softly, remembering, and tiny sparks were gathering in the corners of his optics. 

There was a click and a whirr, and part of his chest armor folded away, revealing the purple badge in a recessed space over his spark. "Ratchet remembers you. Says he never forgot you. He was mad a long time, 'cause they needed you so bad, even though Ratchet's really good at everything. He said he coulda done so much more if you'd been there. But he's done being mad. He needs you. Everybody does. He says please come with us, where you're really needed the most. Where you should be. Everybody's waiting for you." The arrogant attitude had vanished and the eyes looking up at him now glowed with earnest faith. This mech _believed_ so deeply and was yearning to communicate that belief, his EM field flowing upward like a warm ocean. 

Pharma choked, turning away with a hand clamped over his mouth to keep his emotions in, but they were spilling out of his eyes in burst of heavy electrons. He understood the physiological process - the excess buildup of processing signals in the emotional cores behind the optical array needed to be siphoned off the circuits to maintain homeostasis in that processor octant and— 

He just closed his eyes and sobbed. Distantly, he realized that he should be ashamed for losing his professional demeanor in his place of work. Less distantly, he knew that he didn't deserve to cry over this. It was his own fault that he hadn't gone with them, so what did he have to cry about? 

The speedster sat up carefully, his brain still exposed and cables trailing from the medical ports on his neck. "Hey, Doc. Hey. Pharma. Listen, okay?" Pharma felt the gentle press of the auto's hand against his arm. A neutral touch. The way that the lower castes offered comfort to each other. His free hand shook as he laid it over the other's, pushing the palm more firmly against his plating. He could not speak, but he was able to open his eyes and look back again. 

"Listen. Come with me tonight and I'll take you to them. Don't tell anybody, just vanish. I'll wait for you in the alley off the eastern side of the clinic, the one with three dumpsters by it. Finish your shift here and come find me. That's all you gotta do. Understand?" Pharma blinked at him, mind numb. The speedster evidently took that as an affirmative and smiled at him, his gaze still soft and hopeful. "Good. They'll be so glad to see you, you don't get how much. Could you...?" He tapped on the side of his head and pointed at his neck, and Pharma pulled himself together enough to neatly refold the skull plating and remove the monitoring cables. He followed the Decepticon to the door of the tiny workspace, watching the armor slide back over his brand of allegiance. He jumped a little when the speedster took his hand. "I'll be waiting for you. Don't worry." He gave Pharma's hand a squeeze and left the room. 

Sparks were still throwing static into his vision. Thankfully, he heard the tentative, limping steps of his next patient in the hall outside and thought his way to a software switch, flicking it into action to execute an emotional dampening routine that reasserted the control of his medical priority trees over the rest of his potential thoughts. He wiped the last of the hissing droplets from his eyes and quickly scrubbed the carbon residue from his cheeks with a cleanser-soaked mesh. "Come in," he said in a perfectly steady voice, feeling himself slide back into his comfortable work rhythm, thoughts even and focused. His control wobbled when a battered empuratee peeked around the corner, reminding him of Damus. "It's alright, you can come in. Tell me what I can help you with." 

He dreaded every passing minute. He didn't want the shift to end, because then it would be time to act. How he had often ached to be given that same choice again, telling himself that he would choose differently if only he could, but now that that had somehow happened, he couldn't think clearly. All of his certainty was lost. 

The shift inevitably ended and he filed out of the temporary building that the government had put up for its charity clinic, smiling and saying farewell to the other doctors, his mask in place. "Same time tomorrow?" "I'll see you then!" Instead of heading home, he walked slowly eastward until he could see the enforcers' security line and, beyond it, the mouth of a completely ordinary alley with three dumpsters nearby. He could see no one inside, but it would make sense that the Decepticon wouldn't stand around out in the open and draw the suspicion of dozens of officers. He would be farther back, in the dark. _Come find me._ He would find the others too, that way, the no-longer-children that he had abandoned and been abandoned by. Pharma stood there, just close enough to see where he had to go to claim his second chance. 

He stood for what felt like an hour. 

_...I'm a coward. How could I ever trust myself to be different? Why would anyone else trust me to be different? They might put their faith in me - faith like that auto has, that's so raw and powerful that it's frightening - and never protect themselves from my weakness, never think to worry about when I might fold or how I might snap. Would I become afraid enough to betray them? Would I be the weak link in their chain that would destroy everything that they've built, and they would take that risk because they need me? Because they've decided to forgive me?_

He waited for himself to move. 

_...I know how I can help them. I'll protect them from my weakness so they can stay strong. That's more valuable than any medical help they could possibly need. They have Ratchet. Ratchet won't break._

He turned away and went back home. 

He didn't recharge. He wasted an enormous amount of cleaning solvent by sitting under his shower for hours in the dark, the sound of the falling liquid and the pressure of the stream over his armor feeling like another layer of plating around his spark, keeping everything from falling out of him. He cried until the fuses in his optics disconnected to prevent damage to delicate components, leaving him blind until the systems completed an electrical spindown and reset. 

He would get all of this stupid mourning out of his system and then he would be done with it all. He would learn to stop thinking about that one missed chance that had defined so much of himself. He knew what kind of person he was; there was no point in wishing that he could be different. He would cry himself into exhaustion and in the morning he would be fine, and he would go do the worthy work of repairing suffering people and ignore everything else. 

Perhaps two hours before dawn, he could have sworn that he heard his front door opening and closing and the slight vibration of an unusually heavy tread across his floor. He waited, but there were no other sounds. His optics had cycled back into operation and he had calmed down a little between the shower and the deliberately intense weeping. Probably he should at least lay down in his bed so he wouldn't risk cramped cabling after spending the entire night curled up in a corner. Shakily, he stood, shut off the solvent, and stepped into the dryer, not rushing himself. He felt alright. Stable. 

The rest of his spacious hab was also dark, but he knew the layout well enough to not bother with any lights as he headed for his bedroom. Something moved out by the window-wall, backlit by the small, moving lights of the city below. He turned his head and saw that a very large person, at least three times his own size, was sitting comfortably in one of his padded guest chairs around the low entertaining table. The person was looking back at him with bright red eyes, and his biolights were a disturbing shade of life-fuel pink. There were long, upthrust cylinders rooted in his shoulders - gun barrels? Treads - did a _warbuild_ just break into his hab (with uncharacteristic silence) to sit in his entertaining area and enjoy his view? It was almost too surreal for Pharma to feel properly afraid, until he began to remember that the Decepticons were considered a criminal organization and if he had been seen talking to one of them (had the clinic rooms been bugged?) then any number of very dangerous government agencies might decide to disappear him for permanent questioning. Although he would have expected to be killed or captured by now if it was going to happen, as it wasn't like he could give a warbuild any kind of trouble. 

"Doctor." The voice was smooth and deep, and it was as if he could feel it rushing out in every direction and then flowing back into a single point inside his own spark, making the struts of his body sing below the range of his hearing like a strike on a soundless tuning fork. He shivered as the wake of it flowed through him. "Forgive me," his guest said, and this time the voice was only a beautifully sculpted voice, its overtones and half-modifiers an especially elegant blend of upper-class Harmonexian and Iaconi. "Might we speak?" 

Pharma took a couple of steps toward the stranger, who turned his head slightly. The dim citylight from the window picked out the lines of his face...which had been shaped to resemble the Decepticon brand. At least his guest was unlikely to be a government operative. "Who are you?" 

"I am a friend. One of the friends who sent Deadlock to bring you to us, though you left him waiting for you without word. We feared that you had been taken, but Soundwave traced your movements and one of his kin assisted me with your—" 

"Soundwave?" Surely it wasn't that uncommon of a name. "Which Soundwave?" 

"The one that you knew long ago, of course, when we were all attending the Bright Minds Child Development Camp. The Soundwave that you almost certainly remember well." Pharma looked away into the dark and the visitor patiently gave him several moments to respond before continuing. "Why did you not go with Deadlock? Did we misjudge you so badly?" 

"Misjudge me?" 

"We have been watching you for a very long time. Some of us believed that there was evidence of...regret, perhaps. Something that might cause you to come with us if we asked you again." He paused, dropping his gaze as though gathering himself to continue. "Deadlock's mission was that second asking. I am not a part of it. I am here not as a representative of the Cause—" and there the chiming accents clustered so thickly that the visitor manifested a second voice just to layer importance on that word, "—but as an individual seeking to lay his own concerns to rest. Soundwave arranged this meeting as a favor to me." 

Pharma approached until he was standing just out of the visitor's reach and crossed his arms tightly over his spark. Some element of that voice still caused the strangest feelings for only a moment or two at a time - a hum rushing through his liquid fuel, the barest tightening behind his optics, a feeling of being lightly touched on every joint at once. It was as if certain vibrations were being matched with those inside his frame, and after that matching then his body's vibrations submitted to the others, singing as instructed in response. He had never felt anything like it. But each time that something began to happen inside of him, it flickered away as soon as it became distracting. 

"So who are you and why are you being so evasive, if you needed to talk to me so badly that you hacked my door and invaded my home when I was...unwell?" The words were sharp, but there was no force behind them. He was too exhausted, and he felt a growing interest in just getting the mysterious tank to leave in whichever way was fastest. He was of no use to the "Cause." He didn't feel like submitting to an interrogation about it, government operative or no. "There wasn't anyone like you in that group. I would have remembered." 

The tank's glassy elegance wavered as he fidgeted for a moment, still averting his gaze. "I'm Damus." He met Pharma's eyes. "Do you remember me?" 

"...I don't believe you."  
"Obviously, I have been reframed."  
"Anyone could claim that. He was an— He couldn't have been reframed so easily, even if he had the money for it. You must think I'm an idiot—" 

"Let me give you proof." He reached out, his perfectly-built, five-fingered hand absolutely nothing like Damus' claw...and then the stranger seemed to release something internal and the hand jerked suddenly, the thumb curving awkwardly inward and the four fingers pairing up to form two stiff, bent digits. He reached up with his other hand and there was the sound of powerful magnets releasing before he pulled away his entire face - ah, a mask. There was a face underneath it, fully detailed with eyes and a mouth, and his left eye glowed in the middle of a broad strip of ruined dermal mesh. The patch seemed to have been re-gouged so many times that his nanites were accepting the injury as a new default configuration, closing off the dermal microchannels and leaving the endoskeletal metal permanently exposed. There were scratches in that harder metal too, though, as if picking away at the mobile mesh somehow wasn't sufficient. The tank gently wrapped his clumsy, newly-crippled hand around Pharma's wrist, lifting the medic's hand to his face and pressing it across the scar, hiding the injury and the eye from view. 

"You know that empurata cannot be undone simply by replacing components. There is an invasive software element, as comprehensive an overwrite as can possibly be made without the aid of a mnemosurgeon, but even that is not control enough. There is also a precise, extensive pattern of brain module lesions which, coupled with the software edits, create a permanent change in the victim's frame mapping. One's sense of self is made to recognize only the empurata components as one's head and hands. Any other models are...alien. Maddening. They will never feel like part of your own body, no matter how well they are made to integrate." 

Pharma felt the feverish heat of the scar under his hand as the nanites doggedly restructured around it. The optic shutters of that eye twitched in random, barely perceptible spasms. "A total reframe wouldn't fix the mapping errors. Your self-concept is rejecting binocular vision because it feels that two eyes are incorrect, maybe even an injury that needs to be repaired by removing the invasive object—" 

" _Yes!_ " the tank breathed, EM field thrilling as he felt himself understood. 

"And so you're tearing at the mesh around it to distract yourself, to prevent yourself from tearing it out. I see. What about the software, is it—" 

"More fixes are being made regularly, but many are only workarounds. The empurata software is optimized for the damaged brain. If the brain is repaired, then the software mutates into a virus that will cripple basic life functions. Default software cannot be loaded because the hardware is too different for it to run on; the errors are extensive enough that independent survival is impossible. We are at a reverse-engineering impasse. Hardware and software both must be corrected together somehow. Some of the brain repairs are also very complicated, even without considering their effects on the software. The workarounds for hands are the most effective, and I have several running to manage specific situations. The hands themselves work perfectly, of course, but I need conscious reminders of where they are and how I can use them. They feel like tools, not part of my frame. When I pause the programs, you can see how my frame mapping forces them into the claws that I once had. That shape is the one that feels true to me." 

"I see." And Pharma did. He stared into that one eye for long moments, his mind spinning possibilities around each other, developing plans for studying the phenomenon and designing repairs. Yes, it could be done, and Pharma knew that he could do it; the challenge galvanized him, gave him a fascinating puzzle that he could apply himself to with all of his ability— 

But on the threshold, he faltered. There was no way to do such work and remain in the good graces of the state. He would have to leave his life of comfortable shame. 

After a few moments more, Damus asked softly, "Doctor, please forgive me, but...may I put the mask back on? Even air moving across the mesh makes the face feel much worse—" 

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry." Pharma pulled away and watched as Damus reactivated the software in his hand and re-magnetized the Decepticon brand to his face with a sigh of relief. 

The tank looked up at him inquiringly. And Pharma was a coward, not the kind of mech who could make right choices, not even for a just cause, and he opened his mouth to say— 

"Are you afraid?" Damus asked without judgement. 

"...Yes." So afraid, and with no understanding of how he could move past himself, that awful frozen place inside of his mind. 

"I was too, back then. If Megatron hadn't brought me to our meeting that night, and taken me when he ran, I don't think that I could have done it on my own. I owe him everything." He hesitated a moment, then reached out and gently took Pharma's hand. "I can be that person for you now. I can take you, if you want to go. If you know that you cannot do it on your own. And when you are with us, we will all be your strength. We will bear you up when you struggle. You will never have to be alone." 

And Pharma felt how alone he had always been, how alone he had kept himself for all of his life, and the promise of relief from that made him tremble with longing. His lips moved, struggling, and then he tightened his grip on Damus' hand and whispered, "Please... Take me with you." 

Damus rose up from his seat, towering over his friend, his fingers warm around Pharma's; he strode quickly to the doorway in the dark, pulling the doctor along behind him. Pharma hesitated again, looking over at his desk, thinking that he should take his journals, he should take his research notes, his reference books, his work - he pulled against the hand— 

And then he realized that he had all that he truly needed already within his mind and body and that nothing in his old life was worth carrying over into the new one. He smiled and resisted no longer. Damus drew him along through the doorway. They descended the building maintenance stairs, emerging into the alley hand-in-hand, and were gone.

**Author's Note:**

> = This is where I think the story proper should end. However, my brain kept running along past it and now there's a substantial amount of additional material, including the Inevitable Explicit Turn. It isn't another complete story on its own, but I feel a need to post it somewhere eventually anyway. I really want the story-as-intended to stay non-mature, though, so probably I'll publish the omake as its own separate piece in the Choices series.
> 
> = I love JRo, but honestly, the thing about Tarn being so hung up on a fight with Grimlock that he preserved a scar from it for all eternity is damned unsatisfactory. What's described in this story is my deeply-cherished headcanon about Tarn's scar which I will always believe is true no matter what canon says. I feel like empurata should be more complicated than just slapping crappy hardware on somebody, anyway. 
> 
> = I am here for soft sad possibly-neuroatypical "what, like it's hard?" medical prodigy Pharma. This was one of the big examples that I wanted to write about how events can turn a person's development away from what might seem to be their natural life trajectory - this Pharma could have grown into a more canonical Pharma, but being depressed for his whole life filed off all his sharp edges. 
> 
> = This story is tagged "wish fulfillment" because it's wish fulfillment for me as well as for Pharma.


End file.
